Detective Nakai - Into the Fog
by yinboo
Summary: When a man is viciously murdered in quiet Anteford, Homicide Detective Nakai has a hot new case on his hands. But when subsequent misfortunate events seem to center around one girl will he be able to get to the bottom of the mystery before it is too late?


CHAPTER ONE

It is a cool, misty morning in January. The kind of dark, dreary morning that some might rather spend in bed all day in the sleepy rural parish

of Anteford in Rainbow Falls, New York.

She looks out a window on the second floor of her apartment down the bare stretch of Abel Street. She looks back to the untouched easel before

her, then examines her reflection in the puddle of oil-black paint in the mixing plate. A young woman with short, messy auburn hair is staring back

at her indifferently through glassy emerald-tinted eyes.

As if snapped back to life by a suddenly restored instinct, the young woman holds up the brush between her toes and forms a single

wide yellow stroke across the white canvas. Then in one swift motion she bends over and grips a tube of red paint between her teeth out of a rusty

paint speckled coffee tin on the floor. She bites into the tube, neatly squeezing a coil of red pigment unto the mixing plate. Before she can proceed; however,

something in the window catches her eye.

Walking down the sidewalk at a brisk pace, hands stuffed into the pockets of a loosely hanging trenchcoat, is a man. The artist stalks him with her

sights until he disappears beneath the windowsill followed shortly thereafter by the expected sound of a door buzzer.

Detective Nakai is _not _the artistic type. So he rarely ever had business in this part of town, where all of the hipsters and amateur artistes in town were

known to live. But word on the vine was that the girl living on the second floor of this studio apartment had a front row seat to witness what was shaping up

to be the most bizarre and brutal crime ever commited in Anteford, or at least from what the ten year veteran could recall.

A girl opens the door midway and peers out at her visitor. The look in her eyes seems vacant yet unyielding.

"Miss Tezuka?" Hisao asks. She nods dully. "I'm Detective Nakai of the Rainbow Falls P.D., and I wanted to ask you a few questions regarding the incident that

occured on Abel Street last night." He says, flashing his badge at her.

Nakai is let into a small room with unpainted walls, cement flooring and a staircase but very little in the way of decoration. Looking through an archway

to either side, he can also see a kitchen, a dining room and some kind of spare room from where he stands. They all had the same mute, undecorated walls

and gray flooring all around. It all seemed so incomplete.

The use of such a word as 'incomplete' although just in his thoughts, made Nakai feel uncomfortable now that he got a good look at the young woman who had let

him inside. She wears a pair of paint covered blue overalls, slouching slightly, her long white shirt sleeves tied in dangling knots at half length - her absence of forearms

apparent. She is gazing at him intently the whole time until Nakai realizes he hadn't said anything in a while.

"Sorry, I was just taking a look around. It's kind of a cop's habit." He blurbs.

She shrugs then looks around as if it were her first time visiting the place, too.

Taking this as a sign of impatience, Nakai decides it was best to get straight to the point. "Where can we talk, then?"

"Upstairs, since it's where I was when everything happened." She quickly orders rather than offers, then, with a robotic twist of her head followed by the rest of her body, proceeds to

climb up the stairs.

Detective Nakai follows, predicting that he had a weird morning in store for him.

On the second floor there is an art studio that spans the entire floor. The first thing that catches Nakai's eye here are the paintings that populate the walls: really strange yet skillfully articulated abstract scenes of

misplaced human faces and limbs floating in stark, alien landscapes that were flushed in oddly contrasting color schemes. In the corner of the room closest to the stairway is a mountain of depleted art

supplies and equipment: discarded pencils, blackened erasers, loose chips of graphite, mounds of crumpled papers and countless amounts of paintbrushes of various sizes are all gathered here as though they were

simply thrown there one day and forgotten. Hisao picks up an unfinished work that was neatly strewn atop the messy pile. It featured a sloppy attempt made at sketching some kind of creature the realistically

minded homicide detective could not make heads or tails of. On the back of the paper were multiple sketches of different variations of the human eye.

"I've been trying to draw it all day." Rin says out of nowhere. She had since resumed her painting at an easel that faces a wide window overlooking Abel Street. "I mean the monster I saw attack that man yesterday."

She stops painting for a moment, tickling her chin with the brush grasped between her toes and crinkling her brow in concentration. "Or _was_ it a monster? Maybe it was something else I don't know the name of yet."

"These paintings are good." Nakai comments blandly, not that he knew anything about art. He sets the discarded sketch back where he found it and walks toward her with his hands clasped behind his back. "But what

do you mean by _it_? What exactly was it that you saw attack Ray Penbur?"

"Ray Penbur was his name? I didn't know that." She responds with a trace of something in her voice Hisao could not comprehend. Was it amusement? "It was something like a jellyfish, but covered in eyes. And it had

claws."

Nakai raises an eyebrow inquisitively. "Excuse me?"

She pulls her brush away from the page, biting her lip and straining her eyes as though she were having difficulty wrapping her mind around something. "It does sound kind of strange. Not something I see every day, or even

in those nature magazines."

"Could you describe the appearance of the man you saw being attacked by this creature?" Hisao asks, more as a way to gauge her memory than anything.

She blinks and nods rapidly like a child being quizzed on a subject they were confident in. "He had black hair that was long on one side. It covered his eyes. And he wore brown pants and a sweater vest."

Her description of Ray Penbur's appearance was totally on the mark. This surprised but also worried Nakai because it made it more difficult him to doubt her claims to seeing a monster.

"I'll work on it." She says after a while. "Not now, but some day when I can remember it properly."

"What?"

She turns and makes direct eye contact with him for the first time. "I'll paint the thing I saw for you. It's too hard to describe. Maybe I'll get lucky and it will reappear from out of the fog to pose for me."

The rest of the interview goes by without incident. So, less than thirty minutes later after arriving at the place, Nakai exchanges contact information with Rin Tezuka at the door and heads for his car. As he mows

through the dense fog, he reflects on the new information he had collected from Tezuka. Was it really something inhuman that had commited the crime? And if it was, could it still be on the hunt? A predator that

was capable of disappearing into the fog the way she had described it could prove to be a difficult catch.

He shakes his head as he ducks into the driver's seat - there was no way he could take her testimony seriously. Tezuka did not seem like the lying type but she was certainly an eccentric individual. Remembering

the surreal images that covered her walls, Nakai thought it possible the girl suffered from schizophrenia, or perhaps he caught her in the middle of some bizarre artistic vision. Still, he wanted to see that painting which

she had promised to have completed and delivered to him either 'today, tomorrow, or some time this month'. Even though this was beginning to sound more like something out of a Stephen King novel than real life to the

hard-boiled detective, the facts were that Rin Tezuka would have had a clear vision of the scene of the assault and more importantly, she was the only witness to step forward so far. It was a lead, so he'd follow it.

After reviewing the notes he had made during the interview, he revs up the engine. As he pulls out into the street, the telecom buzzes to life.

"There's been a hit and run on the corner of 5th and Dowrey, two dead one wounded, requesting an ambulance and all nearby units."

A hit and run - here was something he could deal with. Something he felt comfortable with. He felt he needed a call like this to stay grounded after such a bizarre week.


End file.
